“I am—”
“No. You can’t be our hero if you couldn’t tell me the truth of my dower. You’re one of Prinny’s favorites, the smartest. Of course, you knew.”
“I did not know, Jemina, not until today.”
“Did you do this, claiming my daughter as Phoebe Dunn’s? Did you help them lock me away like a raving loon?”
Sighing like he’d sprung a leak, he rubbed at his bruised eye socket. “I must confess. I’ve always wanted a daughter, someone else’s toddler for my own. For my own personal plight for abolition, I sought to kidnap and liberate a slaver’s mixed-race child and found the opportunity with theMinerva. Mastermind that I am, I kept Hope from being sent back to an uncertain future in Jamaica.”
“That’s not true? You jest? You’re being ridiculous, Daniel.”
“Am I?” He tapped his chest. “I’m supposed to be in the wrong, remember? And I surely must be wrong to tend to a precious child, one who I believed until this day was my wife’s. To honor Phoebe Dunn, I decided to nurture Hope and garnered her the best physicians to see to her speech impediments and the limbs battered by the waters that sunk theMinerva. I’m evil.” He slapped his arm. “Evil doings must surely be in my blood.”
Moving close, I crumpled the list and tossed it at him. “Don’t you ever do that. Don’t you ever think I put you in the wrong because of your race. It’s the secrets you’ve kept, that’s what ruined us.”
He bit his lip and stared at me or maybe through me. “I meant Thackery evil blood, not Blackamoor.”
My hand flew to my mouth. “I didn’t mean to touch that line, the one between us that you’ve mastered balancing on theton’s tiny thread. But that very line let you and the rest of the world deny that Hope was my daughter. It cost me two years of my life.”
With everything bared between us, Daniel folded his arms and looked at the floor, and I never felt more alone.
CHAPTER 50
JEMINA—NOTWITHOUTMYDAUGHTER
At odds in his Lincoln’s Inn office, Daniel closed his eyes, perhaps to shut me out to retain his practiced calm.
The silence was damning and hurtful.
“Tell me I’m wrong. Explain things to me.” My voice wasn’t loud. It was barely a whisper.
His gaze caught and stroked mine. “You’re right, Jemina. I’d do anything to give you those two years back. Two years that Hope missed her mama. Nothing can make it up to you or her.”
This was true.
Sad and true. I swallowed the growing lump in my throat. It was bitter, everything I’d lost. “You’ve had my daughter longer than I. I should be glad of that, but there needs to be a villain. Who is it if it’s not you or me? There has to be one.”
“There’s none, none here. No man controlled the hurricane that battered theMinerva. It’s late, Jemina. I promised Hope that I’d bring you home. Let’s go get her.”
“How can we just go on, Daniel? You don’t trust me, and I don’t trust you. I have twenty thousand reasons to be wary.”
His gaze lifted; his rare smile bloomed. “Jemina, I do trust you. I know you’ll sacrifice for me. You’ve proven it. In my bones, I know that there’s nothing that you wouldn’t do for Hope.”
That look, confident and strong but with his heart in his eyes—it drew me. I could feel my knees weakening. I should fall in his arms and forget that he knew secrets, forget that he was happy to let me stay in the dark.
Never.
“Take me to Sandlin Court, Daniel. Leave Hope with me.”
“Hope Thackery is my daughter. You’re my wife. You both belong at Finchely.”
His words were measured, careful and deliberate. The barrister was now the judge, and his pronouncement on our residency read like a ruling of the Court of Chancery.
“You’re going to make me and my daughter go with you? You’re going to use your rights and the law to coerce me?”
He gulped a long raspy breath. “Please don’t make me choose between keeping my family together or watching it disintegrate.”
“A family that shouldn’t be yours.”
